Instead, Jean said she wasn’t hungry — large breakfast, you know — but they should go on and cook, obviously, and she’ll fill up on wine, ha, ha.
This last joke turned out to be truer than she’d meant. Every time the three of them finished a bottle, Emily found another to open. Jean became drunk — so drunk, she couldn’t tell if Emily was even drinking with her any longer or just pouring. Soon the meat was done, sizzling on a porcelain platter on the kitchen island between them, and Gunnar and Emily were digging in — except for the occasional swipe of a lemon-scented wet wipe — like hyenas.
Which is when Jean saw, in one of the kitchen mirrors, the old terrarium, iguana and all. She went over to look, drunk enough to confuse mirrors with hallways. When she found the terrarium, she reached into the tank and stroked the iguana’s back. Gently she pinched the tail and turned the loose skin this way and that around the solid flesh, as if twirling a flower by its stem. The feel of the tail between her thumb and fingers made her laugh, and she leaned against the wall until Emily came over to insist she eat something.
“Oh,” Emily said, “I know what you can eat. It’s not much, but…” Off to the fridge she went, and when she came back, she was holding a tiny circular cake. It might’ve been four inches in diameter and two inches tall, and was covered in a dark chocolate ganache topped with an elaborate series of miniature roses — red, yellow, and white. Jean knew right away that Emily’s mother had made the cake, and for some reason — the wine, maybe — Jean started to cry.
The wine wasn’t entirely to blame. Jean cried because she understood for the first time that everything she had accomplished, everything she had become, was what she’d once had in mind for Emily, and now, because Emily had a mother and Jean soon wouldn’t have a mother, none of Jean’s accomplishments — not one — mattered.
Emily went over to hug her, and she was crying, too, Jean realized, and soon they were both laughing, embarrassed. Gunnar fetched them two forks, and together, Emily and Jean ate the small cake. Gunnar threw his arms around them both and asked Jean, “Are you sure you don’t want a bite of steak?”
And before Emily brought Jean home and said good-bye, before Jean kissed Mom on the way to the airport and told her how much better she was looking every day, Jean took Gunnar up on the offer. For one bite, she pretended to be someone else, someone who had stayed in that place and never wanted to leave. Her only bite of meat in over a decade — though it wasn’t her bite, really, but someone else’s — and the meat was good. A shred of the steak stuck between her teeth, and the person who was not Jean tongued at it all night, even in the morning. She never got sick, and she never felt guilty.
* * *
The rain had steadied, light enough now for some of Habibi’s shelter seekers to pull their outer layers up over their heads and walk out into it. The line cooks seemed no less bored for having heard Jean’s story, if they’d heard the story at all. Maybe, what with the steam in the windows, they’d kept their ears perked for a sexy moment that never came. One by one, they fell back into the kitchen. Simon lifted his hands to the chandeliers to inspect the towels. Still wet. By the time Jean and I finished eating, we were ready to brave the weather. Simon tossed us the wet towels, told us to keep them. He mimed the act of stretching one over his head in a storm. New customers came in, putting him to work. We gathered our belongings and tossed out our trash to the sound of the rain dulling itself against the windows. As we were about to leave, Jean turned to the counter and asked in our mother’s language — which I understood but never learned to speak — for dessert.
THE IMMIGRANTS
“Danny Watts” always sounded to me more like the name of an old peasant song, belted out by Irish scallywags lining the fogged windows of a pub, than the name of the half-white, half-Mexican boy I’d later call my friend. But there he was, Dan Watts, unpacking his cafeteria-issued burrito with the air of an archeologist, complaining to his lunch partners about the inauthenticity of the tortilla.
“You can tell whether or not the dough was kneaded by hand,” he said. “My mom always does this thing where, after she rolls out the dough, she slaps it between her palms, back and forth, back and forth, for no reason at all other than to get her skin on it.”
“Gross,” I said, though my mother made her Armenian recipes the same way, and though having another son of an immigrant in the group seemed to me a perfectly symmetrical and therefore agreeable thing to have: Robert Karinger, so fully white that his buzz cut appeared gray under most light, flanked like a kind of chess piece by two loyal but divergent halfies. I’d spent every day of the summer with Karinger, hoarding the treasures we’d scraped from the desert in his bedroom, and I thought I knew him well enough — eighth-graders as we were — to anticipate his saying, starting in a mock-parental tone only to devolve into vulgarity, “Daley Kushner is not often right, but when he is, he’s fucking really right. That skin-on-tortilla shit is gross.”
But he didn’t. Instead, he pulled apart his own burrito, inspected it, and said, as if he’d just realized the all-too-simple purpose of an alien instrument, “Huh.”
Which is when I knew Dan Watts had officially joined the group.
As I said, I was happy to have Watts around to buttress the clear leader of our gang. On the other hand, I was also disinclined to share the only friend I’d ever been able to make, and feared constantly — at lunch and on the weekends, in class or in the desert, jumping tumbleweeds on our bikes — that the two of them would ditch me. A bigger fear than being left entirely alone was to be left and then watched, in my aloneness, by the two boys some short distance away, hidden in a trench in the dirt except for their heartbreaking and eerily natural laughter.
Because of this conflicted take on the new kid, my kinship with Watts would for a long time be reliant on Karinger’s presence. Years would pass before Watts and I spent any significant time together, just the two of us, and even then our conversations inevitably returned to Karinger. In other words, our friendship was more of an alliance, and the fact that I now — as an adult — speak more to Watts than I did to Karinger before he left to fight in the war, is a surprise my younger self would never have believed.
* * *
In college I’d picked up an internship at the Oakland Tribune, where I spent most of my time fetching frozen yogurt for the perpetually shrinking paid staff and peering, a safe distance from the wall-to-wall windows on the twenty-first floor of the sky-rise, out onto Lake Merritt, waiting for the next bit of instruction from my boss. I’d told my parents the newspaper needed me back as soon as possible, and that my visit home that summer after my freshman year could only last a weekend. The truth was my boss had encouraged me to take the entire summer off, and even hinted that my return next fall was less than necessary. But I wanted to be back in the office as soon as I could. I craved the light-headed kind of vertigo brought on by standing near the windows, looking from a building literally ten times the height of any I’d grown up around, out onto the lake, which — even though it wasn’t a lake, but a tidal lagoon — made the desert back home feel lifeless and beige in comparison. So I booked the short flights to and from home — an hour each way — four days apart and packed a tiny gym bag that read, along one side, ESSENTIALS.